Artificial intelligence (AI) may be driving its own progress. An independent examination conducted by the non-profit organization Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) indicated that models developed by Anthropic are progressing almost twice as fast as before. This is partly due to the company's own use of AI systems to create more powerful versions of its technology.
The study, published this Thursday (5th), calculates that the advancement in the capabilities of Anthropic's models in specific tasks increased at a rate of 1.9 times since October 2025, compared to the previous pace.
According to METR, approximately 80% of this current acceleration is linked to the application of AI in the company's research and development activities. However, the estimate has a high degree of uncertainty.
The evaluation was carried out over an 11-week period, covering August to October 2026. Researchers had access to Anthropic's internal data, interviewed employees, and analyzed information on the performance of models that have not yet been made public.
The organization also found that the increase in computational capacity used for training does not justify the observed acceleration. The study establishes a crucial distinction: most of the progress still derives from the assistance provided by AI to experts, not from the autonomous execution of the entire development cycle.
METR stated that it found no evidence that current systems can offer highly relevant and fully independent contributions in the most critical phases of model training. Despite this, researchers detected signs that such participation may become more prominent in the future.
The advance noted by METR deserves attention because it is connected to the concept of recursive self-improvement, known by the acronym RSI. This idea posits that AI systems can increasingly contribute to the generation of new model versions. By assisting in the development of their successors with more competent systems, the process tends to gradually accelerate.
Although this scenario has not yet been achieved in a completely autonomous manner, it raises important questions about the speed of technological evolution. One concern highlighted by METR is the potential for this acceleration to become cumulative, where more advanced models assist in developing even more capable systems, which in turn would intensify the process.
The organization also did not identify clear impediments related to computing power, data availability, or experiments that would certainly block new advances in the next twelve months. However, the researchers emphasized that this analysis is also subject to uncertainties.
Despite the findings, METR recognizes significant limitations. The 1.9-fold acceleration was calculated based on performance indicators in well-defined tasks, which can be assessed through automated tests or language models. This does not imply that all aspects of AI are evolving at the same pace.
Additionally, Anthropic had the prerogative to remove confidential information from the report. According to METR, much of the evidence considered most pertinent to its conclusions was omitted, which complicates an independent assessment of all details.
The organization also highlights the uncertainty about what portion of the acceleration can be directly attributed to the use of AI, especially regarding the progress recorded at the end of 2025.
The results emerge at a time when Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, advocates for prudence in the development of increasingly sophisticated systems. In September, the executive called on the sector to slow down the pace of technological capability advancement so that safeguards could keep up with the pace of improvements.
The study itself points out that understanding the speed of this evolution is vital for risk assessment. If systems begin to collaborate in a progressively more significant way in the development of their replacements, monitoring and control work may also become more complex.



